The National Journal’s Ron Fornier wrote that, and it must have shaken Team Obama because Fornier is a leader of the Manhattan-Beltway media elite, a weather-maker, and the weather this line and story suggests for Obama is stormy indeed.

Fornier then goes on to accuse the president of “reinventing history,” and of course the president did just that and appears committed to trying to keep up this giant scam as millions lose their insurance and millions more are slated to in 2015.

I have been quizzing lefties on this collapse of credibility –first Clarence Page, then Jonathan Alter, with Morning Joe tossed in as a non-lefty among lefties, and yesterday Joy Ann Reid, who may be my favorite lefty of them all because as wrong as she is she is invariably happy and full of energy. The transcript of my chat with Joy is here, but upbeat as Joy was, she is also deep in the Obama trenches fighting with everything she’s got against the advance columns of facts.

It’s just a “bad news cycle” Joy told me, and the president’s “compression” led him into this trouble, which is a lot like what happened with DDT, and “insurance companies do this all the time,” and the attacks on the president are ” irrelevant to the rollout of health care reform. That’s all this is.”

The conversation with Joy is a preview of coming attractions. The cliche is that the “website will eventually get fixed” and then we will see, but we already see –the government cannot do complexity. At least not this order of complexity. It is destroying the health insurance ,markets and with them the delivery systems. People notice. They noticed in Virginia last night and the whirlpool, just beginning, almost took under Terry McAuliffe. It is going to keep getting bigger and bigger, stronger and stronger as the disaster grows.

I’d like fighters like Joy in my foxhole if it ever came to that. But sometimes you just have to retreat. This is one of those times. The president lied. Repeatedly. Obamacare was sold on a massive deception. People know and they will not forget. 39% is just another flight down a long stairway.